Death is a Pinch to Remember to Live Life Well

“We carve out risk-free lives where nothing happens.”  James Hillman, psychologist

If we live all the days between 0 and 80 it is less than 30,000 days. Which really doesn’t sound like a hell of a lot. So if you are 40 it’s less than 15,000 days and 60 is less than 7,500 days.

I purchased the art that is pictured here. I was the only one who bought anything in the show “Domestic Death” by Mary Mazziotti who combines embroidery and fabric paint on pre-printed vintage textiles. The art is a reminder not to take time for granted. It is so easy to get caught up in a deadening routine and then our days slip away.

Therapy is to help people expand their possibilities. It’s so easy to lose track of dreams when you’re trying to pay the bills. So many people in our culture seem to suffer from a lack of dreams or imagination. The recession inhibits risks and dreams. Women often get caught up in their children’s dreams and lose track of their own.

How do you want people to remember you when you’ve died? Consider writing your own eulogy which could give you ideas of how to better live your life now. Each one of us is a fingerprint with our own individual answers. There is not one way to go about it, which is why people’s choices are so interesting. Having less time means there’s more clarity about what matters and less willingness to waste time.

On my husbands 50th, many years ago, I gave him a picture of a diner that had special meaning. In 1975 we were in that diner worrying we’d made a huge mistake. We had $300, and two days to find a place to live in Pittsburgh, a city we had never even visited before. On the back of the picture I wrote “Let’s never stop taking risks”. We’ve continued to live that way without regret. Life is full and rich but only if you step out into it. If you hide from life in fear and routine you will only cheat yourself.

Many people age into smaller and smaller worlds. I’ve watched my mother in law leave behind the synagogue where she worshiped, then she stopped going to her bridge group on Tuesdays and Fridays and now she rarely leaves her apartment. Her world is dramatically shrinking. At her age, 85, it is understandable and yet it is still a shame at the same time. Aging can include more imagination about possibilities and the ability to try new things, never has to leave us.

So find your courage to do something new and be willing to risk failure. Ask yourself what is significant to you. Look at your calendar and checkbook; that will be the evidence of what really matters. Do you want to do anything differently? Don’t take your time on this planet for granted and decide to make the most of it by doing something new and unfamiliar. I doubt I will ever live anywhere without the clarity of four distinct seasons; every season is a pinch to say time keeps moving on, pay attention!

Climbing Out of Depression

“Depression opens the door to beauty of some kind.”  James Hillman, psychologist

Curiosity, music and exercise are three of the smallest stepping-stones to help someone climb out of the grip of depression. Depression is often a dark pit of stuckness and it becomes a trap that appears to be impossible to leave behind, like gum stuck on a shoe. It’s important to decide this is not the truth. Every small step out of the pit matters. Perception is 9/10’s of reality. If you believe it’s impossible to change, you won’t. If you believe it’s a long journey and taking some small steps can be the beginning, it will.

Depression is a very huge obstacle to overcome. One of the smallest steps anyone can take is to find out what they might have some curiosity about. Curiosity is both small and huge at the same time. Depression is often overwhelming and it is curiosity that can give someone a toehold out.

Ways to restore your curiosity:

#1. Start small with noticing a sunny spot in your home. Drag a chair over to that spot and like a cat stretch and enjoy being in the sun in the present. This is an example of using your five senses to expand your sense of life in the moment.

2. Consider going back in time to when you were a child, remember what you were curious about. the stars in the sky, kite flying, or a visit to the zoo. These are small things that give a glimpse that life is woth living.

3. Buy the edition of the newspaper that tells you what’s going on (In Pittsburgh it’s the Thursday Weekender). Do any of the descriptions appeal to you about anything that’s going on?

4. Be curious about your disease. Read a book about depression and learn some new ways to think about your struggle, such as Feel Good Now by David Burns or Mind Over Mood by Padesky and Greenberger are only two suggestions. If you can change your beliefs you can change your life.

Music is another small step. Music does not require anything from you and it gives a lot. If you’re driving to work on Monday AM and dreading the week ahead, pop in some fun music to shift your mood.

Exercise may seem like a big step but it can begin with taking a walk. You can drive to a different neighborhood to walk somewhere different. The research says that exercise is very helpful to making people feel better.

Consider depression as a gift from the soul; that it is an invitation to be more creative with your life. James Hillman, who is quoted above, writes about this idea in his book The Blue Fire.

Surviving Your Broken Heart in Divorce

It is a sad truth that fifty percent of marriages end up in divorce. Women are the ones who leave. Seventy five percent of divorce is initiated by women. There are so many reasons a relationship will end. One person gets a DUI and the other partner has to face the ugly truth. One person lies, forges the other’s name and leaves them bankrupt. One person has an affair more than once and doesn’t solve the problems underneath the affair. Facing up to the harsher realities is a journey I’ve been on with many. After 15,20 or 30 years, suddenly finding yourself stuck with the burden of solving everything alone is very hard to face. The devastating finances are often a shock. No longer joining two incomes is often a surprise lesson in economics. Betrayal lingers and leaves doubt about who you are. It’s no wonder that so many people continue to deceive themselves instead of facing the truth and delay figuring out what’s really going on.

Once again part of the solution is to face the painful uncertainties and willing yourself towards the disturbing picture of reality. This is the beginning of courage and strength. Reality really is your best friend for the long haul, its surviving the present that’s a more tricky deal. So face the loneliness and pick up the phone or find a group that interests you on meetup.org. Subscribe to the newspaper and find new things to sample. Read The Blue Diary by Alice Hoffman who writes delightful fairytales for adults. This book begins with a woman who has the perfect life which does a 360 degree turn on her and she has to face a lot and grow. Discover what’s important to you that has nothing to do with anyone else. Experiment with trying new things. Visit a friend you haven’t seen in a long time. The other persons absence leaves a vacuum and it’s a lot of uncertainty on how to go about filling that up. Embrace the uncertainty and learn how to live with it. Accept it because uncertainty is reality.

Try writing a goodbye letter. This entails writing about what you’ll miss, what you’re relieved not to be around, what was good, your favorite memories, what was hurtful, how you felt betrayed, what you’ve learned, what you hope they’ve learned and anything else that makes the letter seem complete. Be Specific! Describing the details can be very healing. Really starting the process of goodbye includes respecting what were the valuable pieces among the broken shards. Then you can send it or not. Burn it in the grill, bury it with pictures in the back yard or store it in a box. Sometimes rituals can help people to move on.

Grief about a family breaking up can take 1 1/2-2 years. Grieving what you thought you had, accepting the new reality that has emerged takes a lot of time. It’s important to restore your belief that your life will get better. It’s easy to set yourself up for bitterness (which is a very bad idea). Grieve, Let go and Move on.

Risk More Shamelessness

Junot Diaz,the author, spoke at Drue Heinz lectures tonight and it was very rewarding. He talked about his immigrant experience at the age of six from the Dominican Republic to New Jersey. A member of the audience asked him if he had advice for her as a teacher of ESL (English as a Second Language). He shared how important it is for her students to be completely shameless, so that they practice and risk mispronunciation and not be afraid of being picked on. He went on to say if you are sensitive and easily embarrassed it is so much harder to learn a new language. The same can be said for growth of any kind. Shame is a huge obstacle to progress.

Shame is one of the largest deterrents to change of all kinds. The opposite of shame is to risk uncertainty and be willing to not know. When someone asked Junot Diaz what defined him as a person he chose uncertainty. There was something so genuine about his value of uncertainty, that I imagine it comes from his life experience.  Shame is about hiding and staying in what’s familiar even if its very bad because you feel so bad inside and want no one to know. People hide their illiteracy, their mistakes, their vulnerability and regrets, because they fear anyone else rejecting them. When the simple truth is they are the ones rejecting their own humanity.

This is why it is so important that parents or teachers not use shame to push kids into “better” behaviors. Young adults will tell me of experiences when they were young, that were the very beginning of their willingness to give up on themselves. Shame is far more powerful than people realize, it’s impact can last for decades.

I don’t think we talk often enough about being shameless. I’ve been joking with people for months that “I shamelessly flog my blog.” I’m taking risks because having people read it is important. Dictionary.com defines shameless as audacious, and insensible to disgrace. It’s often a good thing to be more impervious to the judgements of others. I can easily imagine someone criticizing Van Gogh for putting his paint on the canvas too thickly. If you want to be good at english and it’s a new language, or an author who writes then you have to care less about what others say and practice, practice, practice shamelessly.

The Drummer; a movie about someone lost in life who finds their way

I started a group that meets monthly to watch independent films that are not widely released. I purchase these films by subscribing to www.filmmovement.com. In two and a half years the best one we’ve seen is The Drummer. It is a true treasure from Hong Kong.

It is about an angry young man, who is the son of a gangster, and he makes outrageously bad choices. He is a genius for getting himself into trouble with his dad’s gangster competition, and he has to leave Hong Kong to live in Taiwan. There he stumbles into a group of drummers who live in a monastery. His arrogance continues to get him into trouble and he is completely mystified when asked to carry a bag of rocks around the mountain they live on. It is breath-taking to witness his transformation.

His story left me considering how so many young people have lost their way. They stop believing in themselves when they’ve hardly begun to know what it means to build character and define a life. To live life well is to understand we have to carry a bag of rocks, that’s part of the deal. This is the beginning of building character. Character is not yelling at a parent because they give you cash to buy gas, instead of the credit card and you’re angry that cash means you have to walk inside to pay. Entitlement and narcissism are the twin dangers ahead for our youth and they are embodied in the drummer’s outrageous behavior in the beginning of the this story.

I lend the movie out, despite the fact it might be someone’s first movie with subtitles. It is a story of one young man’s journey. Staying open to the opportunities of life, which may mean not finishing college, pursuing two or three different career ideas, or finding love in another country. Life holds a lot of surprises. Stories of transformation are inspiring because they’re possible for all of us.

Don’t Mistake Obsessiveness for Love

Obsessiveness erases the other person. It can’t be love if you are so swamped in your own beliefs that you really have no idea that the other person feels differently. Obsessiveness means someone tells you they don’t want to see you anymore and you surprise them the next day with donuts, expecting to be welcomed. The witch in Rapunzel had an obsessive love so she put Rapunzel in a tower that was unreachable except by Rapunzel’s hair. The witch was obsessive and did not care how Rapunzel felt about this situation.

A lot of people convince themselves that their idea of a relationship is the reality. It’s easy to pretend, it’s better than it is, because that’s what you want. It is ordinary obsessiveness when people go back over every word of a conversation, looking for clues of love like Hansel and Gretel following a trail of bread crumbs. What is out of the ordinary, are people who are so busy wanting a body to stuff into the hole of loneliness, that they may not even be paying attention, to whether or not it’s a body worth stuffing. It becomes an obsession to stuff the hole rather than find someone who is worthy. Wanting someone else to fill the hole inside of you is not mentally healthy; it’s your job to define who you are, what you believe, and how to live. If you know those things about yourself it makes you more attractive.

Obsessiveness is complete self-absorption. Love always requires it to be about two people. Obsessiveness is boring, lopsided and so selfish, because you decide that although his/her words were no, she/he looked at me with a yes. Obsessiveness is a whole lot of pretending about the other person’s feelings. Obsessiveness also means you all too easily dismiss your own behaviour – are you drinking every night or giving into sex every date because that keeps the pretending alive, that there is a relationship?

Most relationships start off with one person who is more interested in the other. Obsessiveness is trying to create a certainty where there is none. Relationships by their nature are all about uncertainty. Obsessiveness is like Cinderella’s step-sister trying to stuff her foot in the too small glass slipper; “I’ve never seen this shoe in my life but I’m determined the Prince will by mine.” obsessiveness insists, decides and pushes for what that person wants regardless of what the other person feels, thinks or wants.

Obsessiveness is driving your car to the street they live on and watching for other people. If you do that more than once, it’s called stalking. The opposite of obsessiveness is embracing uncertainty and coping with what happens and letting go of deciding you know what’s best for both of you. Accepting the harsh reality that the other person does not feel the same way about you.

Iris Murdoch wrote a fictional novel called The Sea, The Sea. Read it and experience exactly how tiresome the obsessiveness of the main character is and how he really has no clue, who the woman he kidnaps is. His demand that his point of view is the only one that matters actually has the same tone as the suicide bombers who flew the planes into the World Trade Center. Most fundamental zealots are obsessive in the attitude that complete adherence to their religion is the only way to live. Kathy Bates plays an obsessive, who kidnaps the romance author she “loves” in the movie Misery. While Kathy’s character is over the top in this portrayal, it will give you a glimpse of how obsessiveness creates its own twisted silent certainty. While obsessiveness demands and denies, love asks and risks finding out how the other person really feels and is willing to cope with rejection.

Therapy is Not about Blaming Mothers

Mothers worry a lot when their  adult children begin therapy. There is a cultural perception that problems must be all mom’s fault. The truth is ALL mothers have strengths and weaknesses. We are all a mixture of good and bad in what we offer our children. Popular culture divides moms into good or bad, as if there are only two choices. I reassure a lot of young mothers or grieving mothers about the truth of motherhood, we as parents are ALL a mixture of good and bad. While we are all lopsided in some behaviors such as careful, loving or affectionate; that doesn’t mean that impatient, exhausted or crabby in the morning isn’t the other side of real parenting. It is helpful for all of us to get perspective on both sides of who our parents were to us as children.

Mothers of my clients often get very scared about what will be said about them. As a mom, I accept the reality that there have to be both good things I’ve done and ways I’ve added to their pain, because of not understanding them well enough, no matter how hard I’ve worked at that. It is impossible to be only a good parent. Accepting this truth in the context of the world we live in seems to be a surprise to most young mothers. I often suggest mothers pick two things they are determined to do well and consider what you don’t do well. Be honest with yourself. If you are a parent ask your kids what their favorite two things about you are and what two things might you improve. Be open to their answers and not so fragile that you don’t want to know. When you give your kids opportunity for feedback, you are creating a more trustworthy environment. Power can’t be in only one direction. It is powerful for your kids to experience they’re worth listening to.

Often, I get teens and young adults who are very afraid of crushing their moms by talking honestly about things that bother them. I am especially concerned about this when a young man refuses to invite his mom in, because of long-term consequences. I suspect they will repeat this pattern of silence with a future partner. I believe teens and young adults struggle with wanting to protect their moms to stay in the good category and fear a conversation will slam them into the bad category. In reality the conversation is a teachable moment where greater understanding of differences will create a closer connection. When these conversations are avoided moms miss out on knowing who their kids really are. Hiding out from truthful encounters cheats the relationship.

So therapy becomes a setting to digest both sides of the clients’ experiences growing up. I’ll never forget when Miriam Polster flipped the silence of my father never saying in words “I Love You” to an endearing story. The truth of that perspective stayed with me the rest of my life. Her gentle reminder was that actions and deeds really are what matters. Moms with mental illness can not simply be dismissed into the pile of bad mothers. Moms with mental illness have both strengths and weaknesses like everyone else. A mom who suffers with being unmedicated bipolar can be very difficult because of their unpredictability. They also can be fun, playful and creative. When it comes to moms we seem to easily dismiss them as good or bad which denies the more accurate, complicated picture of reality. As a mom, it can only be a good thing to consider the whole picture of who we are. (Maybe the “greatest generation” is the greatest because they never wanted to explore their own dark sides and were content with the surface.) While there may be a small percentage of poisonous mothers, it is not the vast majority. Most moms are ordinary in their mistakes.

Love can be defined as loving someone enough to have the courage to be authentic with them. For example, if “Gee Mom, we love it when you visit and a month can be too hard.”  goes unsaid, then grumpiness, irritability and resentments happen instead of problem solving.

Trust is a Tricky Business

If you grew up unable to trust one parent in childhood it makes things difficult to figure out in the present. If you grew up unable to trust two parents in childhood it means trust can be a complete mystery. Sometimes trust is confusing because of a trauma when you were too young to protect yourself. Sometimes trust is a puzzle because it’s hard to recover from rejection in high school by someone you truly loved. Sometimes trust is a tricky piece of business because everyone was silent about the reality of an important relative being an active alcoholic. Sometimes an inability to trust leaks through to a present relationship because your last boyfriend was married and you had no clue. In a culture with so many people avoiding the truth about hard things it is very easy to end up puzzled about what it means to trust someone else.

Trusting someone else does not mean never being lied to or mislead. Trust means that when you find the courage to say the truth that the other person can acknowledge what they’ve done wrong and work hard not to let it happen again because it’s important to the other person. The ultimate test of respect is letting someone else influence you to be a better person. Trusting that you have something to learn from each other and can grow by slowly nudging yourself forward into acting differently.

Trust builds on the infrastructure of honesty. Mistakes and mistreating others is a part of our humanity that we all have to live with. Being able to hear someone you care about, complain or present how they are unhappy with you is the true beginning of building trust. When my kids were very little I would say “Tell Mom three things you don’t like about me.” This was to establish trust is not a one way proposition. I was saying I believe you have important things to teach me too. Moms all have a combination of strengths and weaknesses and honest conversation means an opportunity for everyone to grow. I’ve learned a lot from my kids.

If someone says snooping through my phone messages is unacceptable, or you drink too much or you’re spending too much and we can’t afford the credit card interest rates, it’s important to stop and consider how it might be true and what you can do differently to be more trustworthy………even though it may be very hard to admit the truth to yourself. Many years ago, Fritz Perls said “growing up is honestly facing painful situations.” When you are more trustworthy then you can ask for more trust from those you love most. If someone says “You’re not listening to me!” follow that up by asking what is it that you’ve missed out on instead of blowing up with defensiveness. So much of couples work is wading through reactions built on insecurities to reach the kernels of truth both partners have to teach each other. Your relationship has a greater possibility of lasting if you can take a deep breath and face these kernels of truth instead of lying to yourself that they simply can’t be true. Every relationship you are in holds the promise of growth. Don’t turn away from that opportunity to learn, and steady yourself through the initial discomfort because it will be worth it.

Nobody Gets All the Pieces of the Pie

Some people get the happy childhood, some people get a life-long relationship, some people get kids, some people get jobs they love, some people live near the beach, some people have close relationships with their siblings, some people take lots of vacations, some people get physical health, some people have freedom in their work schedules, some people have luck in good weather when they travel, some people work outdoors instead of cubicles, some people have an artistic gift, some people can buy anything they want, and some people have mustangs. Nobody gets all the pieces of the pie in life, nobody. Understanding the luck you do have in life is crucial to living well.

So many are disheartened because finding the right partner is a lot of work, then keeping the right partner requires a lot of work and then losing the right partner requires a lot of work. Living with the wrong partner requires a lot of heartache also. Life is complicated with joy, hard work, pain and suffering from loss. Life asks a lot from us to keep going. The death of a child is so profound it can put the couple’s relationship in jeapordy…..haven’t they suffered enough without losing each other too?

It’s important to remember the pieces of the pie that you do have even in the face of all that you don’t. I remember one lovely young mother of  toddlers who had ovarian cancer and she was angry. Before she died she said “I want everyone to look at my bald head without a wig or a scarf so they know what they have, because I’m furious I don’t have enough time.”  Everybody gets some of it, nobody gets all of it, Nobody.

For Parents & Kids Who’ve Left for College

It’s important for kids to have enough space to grow into greater independence. Like my work, parents are supposed to do themselves out of the job. With all of our technology it is tempting to crowd kids with the parent’s need for connection. This is similar to spanking because spanking is usually about the parent’s frustration. Parents have to sacrifice their needing to know and trade it in for a willingness to not know. 

One idea that parents can soothe themselves with is to remember that kids need to learn and grow by making mistakes. Mistakes are crucial to everyone growing up. You do not want to erase the experience of mistakes for your children (or if you do remember the road to hell is paved with good intentions). Creating a life without consequences leaves children exposed to greater danger and a false sense of security. The movie thriller The Deep End contains exactly this lesson. Tilda Swinton plays a mom who goes to absurd lengths to protect her son from criminal charges. What’s scary about the end of the movie is that he leaves for college without any idea of the poor choices he made that lead to extreme danger.

Letting go of our children is part of the idea in having them. Letting go requires greater respect than many parents are willing to give. Think back to your own mistakes made during college years……….there was a lot of learning involved. Didn’t you love the freedom? Could any adult in your life have inserted themselves into your choices to keep you safe? probably not.

I listen to kids struggle with the consequences of poor choices. The burden of their pain and the weight of it is exhausting. Could anybody have stopped them and convinced them to have better judgement? probably not. Where they were very superficial prior to their mistake I watch them learn, experience regret and gain substance and character. 

#1.  The most important thing any of us can do as parents, is to keep the lines of communication open. Are you the kind of parent who is open to hearing things you don’t want to hear?

#2.  Teach kids to stall difficult choices.

#3.  Help kids to understand how important the brain is to development. The prefrontal lobe where good judgement resides does not even get wired chemically until the age of 25.

#4.  Accept that there is risk in life for everyone and it is not possible to protect your children. Being a hovering helicopter parent can squash the crucial first choices of independence and differentiation.

#5.  Value the idea that children need to explore the world. All too often kids are entertained instead of going off to make their own discoveries. I think that growing up in the 1950’s wasn’t dangerous because of the freedom but because of the secrets and unspoken ongoing tragedies.

I joined Girl Scouts in ninth grade in 1966, Salty was our leader and a completely active alcoholic; we still learned to sail a 3 masted schooner and earned all the money ourselves. I can still hear the ice cubes clinking….We’ve gone from one extreme to the other: benign neglect to hyper vigilance. How about some of the “in between”? Understand that trying to protect young adult children from hurt and disappointment only leads to false expectations. Hardship will be a part of everyone’s life and kids benefit from a bit of practice. Accept you will not get a reply to every email or phone call. Let go and reduce your own false expectations. Consider the idea that worrying about your grown children may be a way of deflecting the responsibility for solving the new emptiness in your own life.